Knut Schmidt-Nielsen Professor of Comparative Literature, Professor of Romance Studies (French), and Director of the Center for Critical Theory. Professor Jameson received his Ph.D. from Yale in 1959 and taught at Harvard, Yale, and the University of California before coming to Duke in 1985. He is the author many books, including Marxism and Form (1971), The Political Unconscious (1981), and Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1990, recipient of the MLA Lowell Award). His more recent works include Valences of the Dialectic (2009), The Antinomies of Realism (2013, recipient of the Truman Capote Award), and The Ancients and the Postmoderns (2015). His most frequently taught courses cover modernist literature and cinema, Marx and Freud, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, and Zizek, as well as the modern French novel and cinema, and the Frankfurt School. Among Professor Jameson's ongoing concerns is the need to analyze literature as an encoding of political and social imperatives, and the interpretation of modernist and postmodernist assumptions through a rethinking of Marxist methodology. He received the 2008 Holberg Prize and the 2011 MLA Lifetime Achievement Award for his scholarship.

Among Professor Jameson's ongoing concerns is the need to analyze literature as an encoding of political and social imperatives, and the interpretation of modernist and postmodernist assumptions through a rethinking of Marxist methodology. His most frequently taught courses cover modernist literature and cinema, Marx and Freud, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, and Zizek, as well as the modern French novel and cinema, and the Frankfurt School. Professor Jameson is also the author many books, including Marxism and Form (1971), The Political Unconscious (1981), and Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1990, recipient of the MLA Lowell Award). His more recent works include Valences of the Dialectic (2009), The Antinomies of Realism (2013, recipient of the Truman Capote Award), and The Ancients and the Postmoderns (2015).